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Fast Movers: America's Jet Pilots and the Vietnam Experience. By John Darrell Sherwood. New York: Free Press, 1999. ISBN 0-684-84784-1. Map. Glossary. Notes. Index. Pp. xix, 268. $25.00.
This is John Sherwood's second book about U.S. aviators. His first, Officers in Flight Suits, was a social history of U.S. Air Force fighter pilots in the Korean War. Fast Movers carries the story on to the Vietnam War and broadens the scope to include Marine and Navy fliers.
There is certainly much here to attract readers. This well-written and documented study has a lot to say about U.S. aircraft (F-4s, F-lOSs, F-8s, and A-6s), aircrews, and air operations in the Vietnam War. Sherwood relies primarily on interviews and secondary sources, conducting almost three hundred interviews to get at the "hidden, personal side of the air war." He does not pull any punches, naming incompetent leaders and vividly describing the fliers' heavy drinking, womanizing, foul language, and crude behavior. His cameo portraits of a few of the more important and interesting aviators are especially well done, as are such topics as Operation Bolo and the F-4.
Sherwood's approach may repel some readers, however. There are those who will question the propriety of naming failed leaders, while others will take Sherwood to task for...